effectually to overthrow it. This account we owe to Cicero, one of the best judges of antiquity; who tells us plainly, that the reason why many rejected the belief of the immortality of the soul, was because they could not form a conception of an unbodied soul. So that infidelity is of no older a date than philosophy; and a future state was not doubted of, till men had puzzled and confounded themselves in their search after the physical reason of the soul's immortality. And now consider how the case stands, and how far the evidence of nature is weakened by the authority of such unbelievers. All mankind receive the belief of a future life, urged to it every day by what they feel transacted in their own breasts: but some philosophers reject this opinion, because they have no conception of a soul distinct from the body; as if the immortality of the soul depended merely upon the strength of human imagination. Were the natural evidence of immortality built upon any particular notion of a human soul, the evidence of nature might be overthrown by shewing the impossibility or improbability of such notion: but the evidence of nature is not concerned in any notion; and all the common notions may be false, and yet the evidence of nature stand good, which only supposes man to be rational, and consequently accountable; and if any philosopher ean prove the contrary, he may then, if his word will

afterwards pass for any thing, reject this and all other evidence whatever.

The natural evidence, I say, supposes only that a man is a rational, accountable creature; and this being the true foundation in nature for the belief of the immortality, the true notion of nature must needs be this, that man, as such, shall live to account for his doings. The question, then, upon the foot of nature, is this: What constitutes the man? And whoever observes with any care, will find that this is the point upon which the learned of antiquity divided. The vulgar spoke of men after death just in the same manner as they did of men on earth: and Cicero observes, that the common error, as he calls it, so far prevailed, that they supposed such things to be transacted apud inferos, quæ sine corporibus nec fieri possent nec intelligi; which could neither be done, nor conceived to be done, without bodies. The generality of men could not arrive to abstracted notions of unbodied spirits; and though they could not but think that the body, which was burnt before their eyes, was dissipated and destroyed; yet so great was the force of nature, which was ever suggesting to them that men should live again, that they continued to imagine men with bodies in another life, having no other notion or conception of men.

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But, with the learned, nothing was held to be more absurd than to think of having bodies again in ano

ther state; and yet they knew that the true founda tion of immortality was laid in this point, that the same individuals should continue. The natural consequence then was, from these principles, to exclude the body from being any part of the man; and all, I believe, who asserted an immortality, agreed in this notion. The Platonists undoubtedly did; and Cicero has every where declared it to be his opinion: Tu habito, (says he) te non esse mortalem, sed corpus: Nec enim is es quem forma ista declarat; sed mens cujusque is est quisque. It is not you, but your body, which is mortal; for you are not what you appear to be; but it is the mind which is the man. This being the case, the controversy was necessarily brought to turn upon the nature of the soul; and the belief of immortality either prevailed or sunk, according as men conceived of the natural dignity and power of the soul. For this reason the corporealists rejected the opinion: for since it was universally agreed among the learned, that all that was corporeal of man died, they who had no notion of any thing else, necessarily concluded that the whole man died.

From this view you may judge how the cause of immortality stood, and what difficulties attended it, upon the foot of natural religion. All men had a natural sense and expectation of a future life.

The difficulty was to account how the same individuals, which lived and died in this world, and one

part of which evidently went to decay, should live again in another world. The vulgar, who had no other notion of a man but what came in by their eyes, supposed that just such men as lived in this world should live in the next; overlooking the difficulties which lay in their way, whilst they ran hastily to embrace the sentiments of nature. This advantage they had, however, that their opinion preserved the identity of individuals, and they conceived them selves to be the very same with respect to the life to come, as they found themselves to be in regard to the life present. But then, had they been pressed, they could not have stood the difficulties arising from the dissolution of the body, the loss of which, in their of thinking, was the loss of the individual. The learned, who could not but see and feel this difficulty, to avoid it shet out the body from being any part of the man, and made the soul alone to be the perfect individuum. This engaged them in endless disputes upon the nature of the soul; and this grand article of natural religion, by this means, was made to hang by the slender threads of philosophy; and the whole was entirely lost, if their first position proved false, that the soul is the whole of man; and it is an assertion which will not perhaps stand the examination. The maintainers of this opinion, though they supposed a sensitive, as well as a rational soul in man, which was the seat of the pas

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sions, and consequently the spring of all human actions; yet this sensitive soul they gave up to death, as well as the body, and preserved nothing but the pure intellectual mind. And yet it is something surprising to think that a mere rational mind should be the same individual with a man, who consists of a rational mind, a sensitive soul, and a body. This carries no probability with it at first sight, and reason cannot undertake much in its behalf.

But whatever becomes of these speculations, there is a farther difficulty, which can hardly be got over; which is, that this notion of immortality and future judgment, can never serve the ends and purposes of religion; because it is a notion which the generality of mankind can never arrive at. Go to the villages, and tell the ploughmen, that if they sin, yet their bodies shall sleep in peace; no material, no sensible fire shall ever reach them; but there is something within them purely intellectual, which shall suffer to eternity: you will hardly find that they have enough of the intellectual to comprehend your meaning. Now natural religion is founded on the sense of nature; that is, upon the common apprehensions of mankind; and therefore abstracted metaphysical notions beat out upon the anvil of the schools, can never support natural religion, or make any part of it.

In this point, then, nature seems to be lame, and not able to support the hopes of immortality which